The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics.
The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida.
Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.

Enseigné par

Dr. Gary LaFree

Director

Bill Braniff

Executive Director

Kate Izsak

Education Director

Joyce Rasing

Transcription

Hello, in the last lecture, I talked about common myths about terrorism and the idea behind this section is to talk about stereotypes that we developed because of the what I call Black Swan nature of terrorist attacks. That is the tendency for people to be overly influenced by a few high profile attacks, like the 911 attack for example, or, other kinds of Black Swan attacks like those that have happened in the last decade in Madrid, in London, in Mumbai, and Oslo. The idea is that these very high profile attacks get a huge amount of press, but they may not hold up when we look at their characteristics across all terrorist attacks. In this case using the global terrorism database or the GTD, a dataset that includes any analysis. I'm going to talk about over a 113,000 attacks. So in the last section I talked about, five of these myths. And in this section, I want to talk about the other four. So myth number 6, is the idea that most terrorist attacks are incredibly lethal, and this certainly makes a lot of sense when we think about the terrorist attacks that we are most likely to receive publicity. They seem to be highly lethal and certainly if we think about events like 911 in Madrid, in London, in Mumbai, it's easy to suppose the terrorist attacks are incredibly lethal. However, when we look at the GTD as a whole if we look at all 113,000 cases we find that more than half of all terrorist attacks since 1970 involve no fatalities. And when people hear this statistic many of them think, how can this be? How can it be that so many terrorist attacks did not in fact result in fatalities. Well, there are several reasons for this. On the first of these and perhaps the most obvious is sometimes terrorists don't plan to do fatalities. Sometimes they are directing their efforts to destroy property. So lots of attacks that are on facilities, they could be attacks on bridges, on electric structures, on factories, and so on. A lot of attacks by environmental groups like the ELF, or animal rights groups like the ALF, have been of this type, where they're aimed at targeting particular kinds of institutions, not at the individuals who are in them. It can also be the case that attacks are aimed at civilians but they fail. In lots of attacks, terrorist organizations plan to take the lives of individuals, or plan to reduce individuals to casualties, but they just are not successfully doing this. And finally, in may other cases, terrorists are not trying to kill individuals, even though they set up situations that could lead to the death of individuals. For example, in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was common for groups like Eta, the IRA, the Red Brigades to warn people before their attacks, before they set bombs off, so that individuals would not in fact be killed in the attacks. So, this kind of thinking actually led terrorism, researcher Brian Jenkins, many years ago to suggest that terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. Now, of course, it's still the case that half of the attacks, about 50,000 attacks in the GTD produced at least 1 fatality. It's also the case that nearly 2% of the attacks in our database, about 1,200 attacks, produced more than 25 fatalities. So when you think of 1,200 attacks over a 40 year period that produced over. 25 fatalities, it's still a very serious problem. And in fact, Brian Jenkins recently revisited his earlier statement. And after reviewing what's been going on for the last decade, has revised his statement to say, many of today's terrorist, not only want a lot of people watching, but a lot of people dead. But nevertheless, about half of all terrorist attacks since 1970 recorded in the GTD produced no fatalities. Myth number 7, most terrorist attacks rely on sophisticated weaponry. If you think about the coordinated attacks of 911 which involved split second timing, involved long term planning, involved a very innovative use of a particular kind of technology that was used in an extremely destructive way. It's easy to think about all terrorism as involving highly planned very sophisticated attack patterns. And if you look at how terror is actually portrayed by Hollywood and by the international media, the sophistication of this kind of 911 attack is nothing compare to the kind of attacks faced by the likes of Claire Danes, and Kiefer Sutherland, and Bruce Willis, and other television and media stars. So, our portrayal of terrorism often involves incredibly sophisticated, incredibly complicated planning. So these images I think encourage us to think that most terrorist attacks depend on sophisticated weaponry and this kind of split-second long-term planning. But contrary to this view of terrorism that we commonly get from Hollywood, the vast majority of terrorist attacks rely on non-sophisticated, readily accessible weapons, and this is clear in the next slide that you'll see. According to the GTD database, 80% of all attacks rely on explosives and firearms which are among the most accessible kinds of weapons that we can get. And for the most part the explosives used are relatively calm and the most common one is being dynamite and grenades. Similarly, the most common firearms are readily available including especially shotguns and pistols. So fortunately for us, in fact, for the world, sophisticated weapons, chemical weapons, biological, radiological, nuclear weapons are rare exceptions. Myth number 8, most terrorist organizations are long-lasting and difficult to eradicate. Given the persistence of groups like Al-Qaeda, like the ETA, like the LTTE, like the FARC, like the IRA. It's easy to think that all terrorist organizations are long lasting and very difficult to eradicate. In fact, you think about some of these organizations that have been around for 30 years and have become really household words where their names are commonly coming up in the media, and if you ask people something about the groups they'd be able to identify them without any difficulty. But nonetheless, when we look at the database, the GTD database as a whole, we find the reality is quite different. The GTD allows us to identify more than 2000 separate terrorist groups that have operated somewhere in the world from 1970 to the present. Now, one simple way to gauge how long a group lasts, is simply by looking at the time between their first attack and their last known attack. If they had a last known attack in many years we can assume that at least in terms of terrorism, they've gone out of business. When we do this, we find that nearly 75% of the terrorists organizations identified in the GTD, have lasted for less than a year. In other words, terrorist organizations are a bit like business startups. They've very likely to go away in the first year of existence. Forming and maintaining terrorist organizations is not all that easy, despite impressions we might get from Hollywood or from the media. So why do we have the impression that terrorist groups are long lasting and difficult to eradicate even when the evidences does not suggests this is the case? I think the reason for this is a kind of psychological explanation that because the ones we hear about, the IRAs, the Al-Qaedas, the Isis' because these organizations get so much attention, we assume that all terrorist organizations are around for a long time and probably receiving attention. But for every Al-Qaeda, and for every ETA there are many more short lived relatively unknown groups that you probably will never hear about. For example, groups like the Anti-Capitalist Brigades and the Revolutionary Flames, which I suspect many of the people following this lecture will never of heard of. Finally, let's talk about myth number 9, that terrorist groups are impervious to governmental counter terrorist policies and that they rarely make mistakes. We could call this the myth of the super terrorist. And again it follows very dramatically from big events, black swan events, like 911, like Madrid, like London, and like Mumbai. These events seemed very difficult to head off, they seemed like events that we couldn't bargain our way out of, and that we were sort of impervious to being able to stop. And so you get this incredible advanced planning, destructiveness, and these all contribute to the notion of these terrorists groups being somehow unstoppable and infallible. Well, my colleagues and I at the START Center have engaged in a number of research projects over the years, which suggest that in fact terrorists groups are not infallible, that they frequently make mistakes. I just want to offer one example in this short lecture. My colleagues and I did a study a few years ago on a group called, The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, ASALA. It was a group that was very active based in Turkey, especially active in the 1970s and 1980s. We were especially interested in this group because after mounting a long series of deadly terrorist attacks throughout the 70s and 1980s, ASALA disappeared very rapidly and we were very curious to figure out why. Why did a group that was so destructive and causing so much trouble disappear fairly rapidly. And after we looked at a whole bunch of different explanations and even did some statistical modelling of these explanations, our conclusion was that the most convincing explanation for the rapid decline of ASALA was a strategic shift they made. A strategic, we would say, a strategic error in their targeting strategies. Before the early 1980s, ASALA was careful to target Turks and to avoid non-Turkish targets, especially Armenians, as casualties or fatalities. And this was very important because Armenian support groups in ASALA were reaching out to the Armenian diaspora community around the world, and also had quite a bit of sympathy from Western Europe, where many people saw them as having a reasonably just cause. But starting in the early 1980s they became far less discriminant in their targeting methods. They started killing non-Turks and killing innocent people much more frequently. The historical event that I think best represents this was an attack at an early airport in Paris in 1983. An explosive device detonated prematurely in the terminal area by the Turkish airline counter, it killed 8 people it wounded over 50 more. Many of the people killed and wounded were Non-Turkish citizens, include many citizens from Western European countries. And this increasing reliance on brutal random violence such as this attack on Orly created a much more polarized and hostile climate among the former supporters of ASALA. It made it very difficult for the supporters of ASALA to reach out to the diaspora community around the world for financial support for their operations. It also made then much less popular for groups that might have been somewhat sympathetic in Western Europe. So, essentially, ASALA seriously miscalculated the impact of their changing strategy on their supporters, and this is not an isolated example. There are plenty of examples of misjudgment and even outright incompetence on the part of terrorists. So I want us to get away from thinking about this sort of myth of the super terrorists, like they're totally infallible. I'll just give a couple of examples. Less than 90 minutes after detonating a massive truck bomb, in front of the Alfred P Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh was arrested for driving without a license plate. You might think that you would've gotten your license plate in order if you wanted to avoid detection after committing a major terrorist attack. There's another interesting example in 1993, a group of Islamic extremists drove a rented bomb laden van into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center Complex. They then used the timer to set the bomb to detonate, when the bomb exploded, it killed six people and wounded over a thousand more. It was kind of a shocking precursor actually to the 911 attack, but what's remarkable about this attack, is 3 hours after the explosion, one of the chief conspirators on the plot, Mohammed Salame Returned to the Ryder rental agency in New Jersey to get his deposit for the rented van back. It gets even more curious, when the rental company refused to return his $400 deposit without a police report, Salameh went to the police to report the van stolen. Eventually, Salameh's desperate attempts to get his $400 deposit back unraveled the entire conspiracy. So, contrary to our stereotypes based on 911 and a few other extraordinary events. Many terrorist attacks for the past decades probably most have relied on readily available, unsophisticated weapons, and frequently involve few or no fatalities, the typical terrorist group disappears in less than a year. And there's ample evidence that terrorists frequently make strategic errors. Attacks were declining just before 911, and very few attacks involved disgruntled groups from one country attacking civilians in another country. So what I've tried to do in these two lectures is get us to think about the kind of big picture. To kind of think about terrorism from a social science standpoint, not just look at individual high profile case studies, but think about terrorism in a much broader context, and I want to thank you for your attention.